Relational

How to spell relational

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce relational

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does relational mean?

1. adjectiveConcerning the way people or things are connected to one another.
2. adjectiveDescribing a type of database that organises data into linked tables.

Relational in a sentence

• The therapist focused on the relational patterns within the family.

• The company migrated its records into a relational database.

• Good managers understand the relational side of leading a team.

• Each customer order is joined across several relational tables.

Where does relational come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Relational descends from the Latin verb referre, meaning 'to carry back' or 'to bring back', whose past participle stem latus gave Latin the noun relatio, literally 'a carrying back' and so 'a reporting' or 'a connection between things'. By the late Middle Ages this had become the English noun 'relation', describing the way one thing stands in respect to another, and the adjective 'relational' was formed in the seventeenth century by adding the ordinary suffix -al. The hidden lat root, the same one buried in 'translate', 'collate' and 'legislate', explains why the middle of the word is spelled with -lat- rather than the more obvious sounds you hear. In modern use the word ranges from the human (how people relate to one another) to the technical, since in the 1970s computer scientists adopted 'relational' to describe databases that store information as linked tables. The spelling trap is purely auditory: the unstressed -tion- is pronounced 'shun', yet it must be written t-i-o-n-a-l.

How the word is built

• re- (back)
• lat- (carried, from Latin latus, the supine of ferre 'to carry')
• -ion (noun-forming)
• -al (adjective-forming)